(In a recent discussion document titled "Clearing the air on cloud computing", Will Forrest of McKinsey & Co. offered his view on cloud computing. Unedited comments on the report from Mike Cameron and Rod Fontecilla, Booz Allen Hamilton Principals are provided below, published at their request.)

The recent McKinsey report on cloud computing “Clearing the air on cloud computing” has caused a bit of a stir, primarily since it purports to demonstrate that cloud computing can be twice as expensive as traditional data centers in some applications. Since this report makes a claim to an analysis of cloud economics, we would like to weigh in with a couple of comments regarding the report.

The McKinsey report, as presented, seeks to be the “other voice” and offer a contrarian view of cloud computing. The first thing we noted was the statement, on slide 7, that “Cloud computing can divert IT departments’ attention from technologies that can actually deliver sizeable benefits; e.g., aggressive virtualization.” This view seems to be an underlying motif in subsequent discussions, yet it is a premise that is not substantiated.

We are also somewhat taken aback by a management consulting firm is proposing an “industry standard definition” for cloud computing, having rejected, for various reasons, the definitions used by the IT vendors and data center owners that are currently creating cloud computing in the industry, as well as by centers of academic excellence (e.g., the computer science department at Berkeley). We are surprised that McKinsey rejected a definition of cloud computing (slide 11) because the definition doesn’t provide “definitive economic implications.” Webster’s dictionary defines “bicycle” without making any economic implications.

Definitions say what something is. Economic implications are a value judgment. We do not understand how a definition, absent a value judgment. It is also an assertion by McKinsey that the definition fails because it does “not distinguish cloud services from clouds.” Interestingly, on slide 17, a cloud service is defined as having two of the three key requirements of a cloud. This leaves McKinsey’s definition of cloud services to mean “not quite a cloud.” The report does not attempt to define what cloud services are, stating only that “it could run on top of a cloud.”

They state that cloud offerings “are most attractive” to small and medium sized business, and “there are significant hurdles to the adoption of cloud services by large enterprises.” That would come as quite a shock to Target, Eli Lily, the New York Stock Exchange, the American Stock Exchange, NSADAQ, Toyota, E*Trade, Computer Associates, and a host other large enterprises that have been in the cloud for a couple of years.

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The “significant hurdles” to cloud adoption by large organizations appear to be McKinsey’s opinions but not supported by hard data. For example, “business perceptions of increased IT flexibility and effectiveness will have to be properly managed.” What perceptions? Managed by whom?

We are trying to figure out how McKinsey got to the numbers they cite, on slide 24, in their comparison of CPU costs per month in the data center versus in the cloud. Taking the $14K/server cited on slide 23, and dividing that out over a three year refresh cycle, costing it out by month, and dividing by 8 to reflect the cost of each processing core, I got to $48/month. But that price does not reflect any power, facilities, or labor, so the “Total Cost of Assets” MUST be higher than the figure cited by McKinsey, unless they changed assumptions between examples. They also make an assumption of an Amazon large instance (discounted by 25% for reasons that are not provided) and calculate a cost per month of $270.

Where this example appears to break down is that, for the data center, they are calculating the cost per core, while for Amazon they are calculating the cost of a Large EC2 instance, which is four cores. On a single-core basis, an EC2 Small instance is only $72 month, running non-stop. Assuming the same 10% utilization used in other examples, the comparison should be $48/month for the data center and $7.20 month for EC2.

Their assertion that moving a data center to the cloud provides a 10-15% savings in labor seems to be well off the mark. In the discussions with cloud providers, we learned that labor went from being one of the largest components of cost to an insignificant component of cost, largely because of virtualization (reduced hardware baseline plus ease of provisioning logical, rather than physical, devices) and elasticity (automated resource management).

Kevin Jackson, founder of the GovCloud Network, is an independent technology and business consultant specializing in mission critical solutions. He has served in various senior management positions including VP & GM Cloud Services NJVC, Worldwide Sales Executive for IBM and VP Program Management Office at JP Morgan Chase. His formal education includes MSEE (Computer Engineering), MA National Security & Strategic Studies and a BS Aerospace Engineering. Jackson graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1979 and retired from the US Navy earning specialties in Space Systems Engineering, Airborne Logistics and Airborne Command and Control. He also served with the National Reconnaissance Office, Operational Support Office, providing tactical support to Navy and Marine Corps forces worldwide. Kevin is the founder and author of “Cloud Musings”, a widely followed blog that focuses on the use of cloud computing by the Federal government. He is also the editor and founder of “Government Cloud Computing” electronic magazine, published at Ulitzer.com.
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Even as cloud and managed services grow increasingly central to business strategy and performance, challenges remain. The biggest sticking point for companies seeking to capitalize on the cloud is data security. Keeping data safe is an issue in any computing environment, and it has been a focus since the earliest days of the cloud revolution. Understandably so: a lot can go wrong when you allow valuable information to live outside the firewall. Recent revelations about government snooping, along with a steady stream of well-publicized data breaches, only add to the uncertainty

SYS-CON Events announced today that Dyn, the worldwide leader in Internet Performance, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Dyn is a cloud-based Internet Performance company. Dyn helps companies monitor, control, and optimize online infrastructure for an exceptional end-user experience. Through a world-class network and unrivaled, objective intelligence into Internet conditions, Dyn ensures traffic gets delivered faster, safer, and more reliably than ever.

Hadoop as a Service (as offered by handful of niche vendors now) is a cloud computing solution that makes medium and large-scale data processing accessible, easy, fast and inexpensive.
In his session at Big Data Expo, Kumar Ramamurthy, Vice President and Chief Technologist, EIM & Big Data, at Virtusa, will discuss how this is achieved by eliminating the operational challenges of running Hadoop, so one can focus on business growth. The fragmented Hadoop distribution world and various PaaS solutions that provide a Hadoop flavor either make choices for customers very flexible in the name of opti...

As organizations shift toward IT-as-a-service models, the need for managing and protecting data residing across physical, virtual, and now cloud environments grows with it. CommVault can ensure protection &E-Discovery of your data – whether in a private cloud, a Service Provider delivered public cloud, or a hybrid cloud environment – across the heterogeneous enterprise.
In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Randy De Meno, Chief Technologist - Windows Products and Microsoft Partnerships, will discuss how to cut costs, scale easily, and unleash insight with CommVault Simpana software, the only si...

Cloud data governance was previously an avoided function when cloud deployments were relatively small. With the rapid adoption in public cloud – both rogue and sanctioned, it’s not uncommon to find regulated data dumped into public cloud and unprotected. This is why enterprises and cloud providers alike need to embrace a cloud data governance function and map policies, processes and technology controls accordingly.
In her session at 15th Cloud Expo, Evelyn de Souza, Data Privacy and Compliance Strategy Leader at Cisco Systems, will focus on how to set up a cloud data governance program and s...

Roberto Medrano, Executive Vice President at SOA Software, had reached 30,000 page views on his home page - http://RobertoMedrano.SYS-CON.com/ - on the SYS-CON family of online magazines, which includes Cloud Computing Journal, Internet of Things Journal, Big Data Journal, and SOA World Magazine. He is a recognized executive in the information technology fields of SOA, internet security, governance, and compliance. He has extensive experience with both start-ups and large companies, having been involved at the beginning of four IT industries: EDA, Open Systems, Computer Security and now SOA.

The Workspace-as-a-Service (WaaS) market will grow to $6.4B by 2018. In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Seth Bostock, CEO of IndependenceIT, will begin by walking the audience through the evolution of Workspace as-a-Service, where it is now vs. where it going.
To look beyond the desktop we must understand exactly what WaaS is, who the users are, and where it is going in the future. IT departments, ISVs and service providers must look to workflow and automation capabilities to adapt to growing demand and the rapidly changing workspace model.

The industrial software market has treated data with the mentality of “collect everything now, worry about how to use it later.” We now find ourselves buried in data, with the pervasive connectivity of the (Industrial) Internet of Things only piling on more numbers. There’s too much data and not enough information.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Bob Gates, Global Marketing Director, GE’s Intelligent Platforms business, to discuss how realizing the power of IoT, software developers are now focused on understanding how industrial data can create intelligence for industrial operations. Imagine ...

Operational Hadoop and the Lambda Architecture for Streaming Data
Apache Hadoop is emerging as a distributed platform for handling large and fast incoming streams of data. Predictive maintenance, supply chain optimization, and Internet-of-Things analysis are examples where Hadoop provides the scalable storage, processing, and analytics platform to gain meaningful insights from granular data that is typically only valuable from a large-scale, aggregate view. One architecture useful for capturing and analyzing streaming data is the Lambda Architecture, representing a model of how to analyze rea...

SYS-CON Events announced today that Vitria Technology, Inc. will exhibit at SYS-CON’s @ThingsExpo, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Vitria will showcase the company’s new IoT Analytics Platform through live demonstrations at booth #330. Vitria’s IoT Analytics Platform, fully integrated and powered by an operational intelligence engine, enables customers to rapidly build and operationalize advanced analytics to deliver timely business outcomes for use cases across the industrial, enterprise, and consumer segments.

The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to evolve the way the world does business; however, understanding how to apply it to your company can be a mystery. Most people struggle with understanding the potential business uses or tend to get caught up in the technology, resulting in solutions that fail to meet even minimum business goals.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Jesse Shiah, CEO / President / Co-Founder of AgilePoint Inc., showed what is needed to leverage the IoT to transform your business. He discussed opportunities and challenges ahead for the IoT from a market and technical point of vie...

Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are increasing at an unprecedented rate. The threat landscape of today is drastically different than just a few years ago. Attacks are much more organized and sophisticated. They are harder to detect and even harder to anticipate. In the foreseeable future it's going to get a whole lot harder. Everything you know today will change. Keeping up with this changing landscape is already a daunting task. Your organization needs to use the latest tools, methods and expertise to guard against those threats. But will that be enough? In the foreseeable future attacks w...

HP and Aruba Networks on Monday announced a definitive agreement for HP to acquire Aruba, a provider of next-generation network access solutions for the mobile enterprise, for $24.67 per share in cash. The equity value of the transaction is approximately $3.0 billion, and net of cash and debt approximately $2.7 billion. Both companies' boards of directors have approved the deal.
"Enterprises are facing a mobile-first world and are looking for solutions that help them transition legacy investments to the new style of IT," said Meg Whitman, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of HP...

Containers and microservices have become topics of intense interest throughout the cloud developer and enterprise IT communities.
Accordingly, attendees at the upcoming 16th Cloud Expo at the Javits Center in New York June 9-11 will find fresh new content in a new track called PaaS | Containers & Microservices
Containers are not being considered for the first time by the cloud community, but a current era of re-consideration has pushed them to the top of the cloud agenda. With the launch of Docker's initial release in March of 2013, interest was revved up several notches. Then late last...

The explosion of connected devices / sensors is creating an ever-expanding set of new and valuable data. In parallel the emerging capability of Big Data technologies to store, access, analyze, and react to this data is producing changes in business models under the umbrella of the Internet of Things (IoT). In particular within the Insurance industry, IoT appears positioned to enable deep changes by altering relationships between insurers, distributors, and the insured.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Michael Sick, a Senior Manager and Big Data Architect within Ernst and Young's Financial Servi...

The explosion of connected devices / sensors is creating an ever-expanding set of new and valuable data. In parallel the emerging capability of Big Data technologies to store, access, analyze, and react to this data is producing changes in business models under the umbrella of the Internet of Things (IoT). In particular within the Insurance industry, IoT appears positioned to enable deep changes by altering relationships between insurers, distributors, and the insured.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Michael Sick, a Senior Manager and Big Data Architect within Ernst and Young's Financial Servi...

PubNub on Monday has announced that it is partnering with IBM to bring its sophisticated real-time data streaming and messaging capabilities to Bluemix, IBM’s cloud development platform.
“Today’s app and connected devices require an always-on connection, but building a secure, scalable solution from the ground up is time consuming, resource intensive, and error-prone,” said Todd Greene, CEO of PubNub. “PubNub enables web, mobile and IoT developers building apps on IBM Bluemix to quickly add scalable realtime functionality with minimal effort and cost.”

Sensor-enabled things are becoming more commonplace, precursors to a larger and more complex framework that most consider the ultimate promise of the IoT: things connecting, interacting, sharing, storing, and over time perhaps learning and predicting based on habits, behaviors, location, preferences, purchases and more.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Tom Wesselman, Director of Communications Ecosystem Architecture at Plantronics, will examine the still nascent IoT as it is coalescing, including what it is today, what it might ultimately be, the role of wearable tech, and technology gaps stil...

With several hundred implementations of IoT-enabled solutions in the past 12 months alone, this session will focus on experience over the art of the possible. Many can only imagine the most advanced telematics platform ever deployed, supporting millions of customers, producing tens of thousands events or GBs per trip, and hundreds of TBs per month.
With the ability to support a billion sensor events per second, over 30PB of warm data for analytics, and hundreds of PBs for an data analytics archive, in his session at @ThingsExpo, Jim Kaskade, Vice President and General Manager, Big Data & Ana...

The Internet of Things has emerged as the universally accepted term for the ‘next big thing’ wave, not replacing but building upon the Cloud Computing cycle, which itself built upon SaaS and ASPs.
There are many technology aspects to this trend, which will be covered extensively throughout this guide and ongoing series, but overall our goal is to describe the associated startup venture opportunities.
Indeed it’s not limited to startups, the IoT represents a new product innovation platform for any and all businesses, and this is the overall theme of this paper.

An anatomy of startup ventures for the Internet of Things market. Like GE describes in their white paper Pushing the Boundaries of Mind and Machine, this is basically a process of innovating through more intelligent machines to reinvent workflow models.
For a useful overview as to what constitutes an ‘IoT startup’, check out one example for some key characteristics: Hutgrip. Hutgrip is a SaaS solution that replaces VPNs with the Cloud and real time analytics, with the headline points being:
Clear description of the business benefit the new technology will bring – Smarter automation of bi...

A large US insurance carrier, based in the Midwest, has improved its applications’ lifecycle to make enterprise mobility a must-have business strength.
This five-part series of penetrating discussions on the latest in enterprise mobility explores advancements in applications design and deployment technologies across the full spectrum of edge devices and operating environments.
Our next innovation interview focuses on how a large US insurance carrier, based in the Midwest, has improved its applications’ lifecycle to make enterprise mobility a must-have business strength.

Containers and microservices have become topics of intense interest throughout the cloud developer and enterprise IT communities.
Accordingly, attendees at the upcoming 16th Cloud Expo at the Javits Center in New York June 9-11 will find fresh new content in a new track called PaaS | Containers & Microservices
Containers are not being considered for the first time by the cloud community, but a current era of re-consideration has pushed them to the top of the cloud agenda. With the launch of Docker's initial release in March of 2013, interest was revved up several notches. Then late last...

We continue to see an increasing trend in cyber-attacks in line with the growth of new technologies, and enterprises have to protect themselves. It is critical for enterprises to devise their own measures to protect against cyber-attacks because any tolerance on this front is more than an IT issue but may affect the very existence and the business model of the enterprise. We have seen in a recent incident where a cyber-attack prevented a large enterprise from performing their basic business process.

One of the most exciting parts of this week's Apple Watch launch was the example of the BMW watch app. This app allows you to see the charging status of your BMWi electric car, right from your wrist. You can also check the status of the doors of your car (important information such as if they are locked or not!). Although the star of the show was the watch app, APIs had a cameo appearance, since the information shown on the watch is fetched in real-time from APIs.

One of the neat things about microservices is the ability to segment functional actions into scalability domains. Login, browsing, and checkout are separate functional domains that can each be scaled according to demand. While one hopes that checkout is similarly in demand, it is unlikely to be as popular as browsing, after all, and the days of wasting expensive money on idle compute resources went out when the clouds descended.
In that same vein comes the ability to also create performance domains. After all, if you're scaling out a specific functional service domain you can also specify p...

It is no surprise to anyone that service providers need to find new sources of revenue and increase profitability. The digital, cloud and as-a-service revolution provides a silver lining.
As IT organizations feel the tension that comes from a combination of aging legacy B2B infrastructure, changing business mandates and rapidly evolving e-commerce requirements, they are increasingly looking at digital services and outsourcing to trusted providers. They want a trusted partner to deliver connected digital services; including mobile, cloud and M2M/IoT.
The pressure is on for businesses to thin...

When people talk about the Internet of Things (IoT) they tend to think about big data technologies like Hadoop where petabyte size datasets are store and analyzed for both known and unknown patterns. What many people don’t realize is that many IoT use cases only require small datasets.

I attended a Meetup yesterday in Mountain View, hosted by The Hive group on the subject of Lambda Architecture. Since I had never heard about this new phrase, my curiosity took me there. There was a panel discussion and panelists came from Hortonworks, Cloudera, MapR, Teradata, etc.
Lambda Architecture is a useful framework to think about designing big data applications. Nathan Marz designed this generic architecture addressing common requirements for big data based on his experience working on distributed data processing systems at Twitter. Some of the key requirements in building this archi...

Back in 2003 I wrote an article that described the forthcoming evolution of the Cloud, and with it the development towards the SIngularity. The growing use of XML Web services would see them evolve to become intelligent agents, forming the basis for this collective.
This would fit well with the vision of the ‘Internet of Things’, where lots and lots of devices of all shapes and sizes will be equipped with an IP address and some small amount of self intelligence. Cars and traffic lights that are able to interoperate to better manage themselves for example.

Connected cars will create new business models and provide opportunities for current businesses to greatly improve their service offerings.
Areas like targeted marketing, fleet management, event planning, city planning, insurance, and auto repair will benefit immensely from the data that connected cars will provide in the not too distant future.
Check out my latest post on Forbes to see how.

A friend of mine's son recently returned from an extended absence which basically removed him from nearly all aspects of technology, including the Internet, for a bit longer than 5 years. Upon return, observing him restore his awareness of technologies and absorb all things new developed over the past 5 years was both exciting and moving.
To be fair, the guy grew up in an Internet world, with access to online resources including Facebook, Twitter, and other social applications.
The interesting part of his re-introduction to the "wired" world was watching the comprehension flashes he went t...

I ran into an interesting problems with JavaFX. When the GUI is done in FXML it seems that if a scene has only shapes (e.g., Rectangle, Circle, etc.) the handler method doesn’t receive keyboard events. And the problem seems to be that there is no way (at least I don’t see it) to give a focus to such a scene. I found a workaround, but I’d appreciate if someone could offer a cleaner solution or confirm that this is a JavaFX bug.

Lou Gerstner became president of American Express in 1985 at the age of 43. He dismissed the speculation that his success was the product of being a workaholic. Gerstner said, “I hear that, and I can’t accept that. A workaholic can’t take vacations, and I take four weeks a year.”
As I write this, I’m in Wyoming with the family enjoying Yellowstone and Jackson Hole thinking, “Can I somehow achieve the level of impact of Lou Gerstner with the right work-life balance?” What keeps people from having to cancel vacations, modifying schedules to take budget calls, or work while the family sleeps?...

The competition among public cloud providers is red hot, private cloud continues to grab increasing shares of IT budgets, and hybrid cloud strategies are beginning to conquer the enterprise IT world.

Big Data is driving dramatic leaps in resource requirements and capabilities, and now the Internet of Things promises an exponential leap in the size of the Internet and Worldwide Web.

The world of SDX now encompasses Software-Defined Data Centers (SDDCs) as the technology world prepares for the Zettabyte Age.

Add the key topics of WebRTC and DevOps into the mix, and you have three days of pure cloud computing that you simply cannot miss.

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